Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain

Another one of those too-easy marks, but I can’t let it go. I never can. I’m bad that way. [voice rising to a shriek] I just can’t let anything go! It’s Giles Fraser daydreaming again.

What is fascinating about the ill-fated combination of the BNP and Christian Voice is that it demonstrates how deeply resistant Christianity is to all forms of racism. It has not always been apparent that this was the case. After all, Christianity had a hand in slavery and apartheid.

Sorry, people of Putney, but I find that hilarious. It has not always been apparent that Christianity is deeply resistant to all forms of racism. Why? Because it had a hand in slavery – meaning, for not just a few minutes or a week or two or fifty years but centuries, official Christianity and most of its practitioners slept soundly every night and ate a good dinner every noon despite the presence of slavery in their midst, sometimes so in their midst that it raised and cooked the good dinner and generated the wealth that paid for the fluffy pillows and the houses that sheltered them. But nevertheless it was (because it is) the case that Christianity is deeply resistant to all forms of racism. This tranquil ability to live happily and prosperously right alongside it and often right off it, with whippings and overwork and broken-up families all complete, was a mere appearance, you see; the resistance was the reality. A deeply buried, hidden, undetectable reality, to be sure, kind of like the structure of the atom, but a reality all the same. Only for a long, long, long time, while generations of slaves were born and lived crappy lives and died, this hidden fact was not apparent. These things take time, you know. The apparent does not always become apparent just right away – sometimes it takes thousands of years. But finally the mills of god deliver the goods, and they do it right around the time that modern compassionate vicars who think slavery is a bad idea are on hand to look at the view. Then lo! the vicar looks at the view, and he sees the Christianity of his own day, and he sees a religion that is deeply resistant to all forms of racism – not just at the moment, contingently, but of its essence, and for all time – only not in a way that is apparent.

But Christianity also played a decisive role in the dismantling of both. For every bigot wanting to exploit Christianity in the service of racist ideology, there is a Wilberforce or a Tutu reminding Christians of what’s in the Bible.

Oh well that’s fine then. Christianity propped slavery up for a few centuries, and then finally when it got its wits together, it inspired a tiny minority of Christians to think slavery was a bad idea. And as for the second sentence – bullshit! Are there in fact as many Tutus as there are racist bigots? Of course not. Racist bigots are a dime a dozen, and Tutus are not. So what does he mean by saying their numbers are exactly equivalent? Nothing, he just wasn’t thinking, that’s all; he wanted to say what sounded good and he didn’t think about his own meaning.

Don’t get me wrong; that’s not to say it’s not admirable and moving when religion does stiffen people’s resistance to racism and other injustice. It’s just to say that ‘apparent’ lack of resistance to racism is something more than mere appearance. It’s the genuine article.

It does get a bit wearying, sometimes, when you realize that this kind of unthinking double-talk just keeps showing up, year after year, century after century. It’s because most people are so afraid of the hard facts of life, especially death, that they cling to any kind of comfort they can invent for themselves, however fallacious.

If it were only for the comfort, one could just leave them to their pipe-dreams. But unfortunately it also has unfortunate social consequences, such as justifying slavery.

I like that last bit: ” . . .reminding Christians of what’s in the Bible.” As if it goes without saying that the Bible condemns racism & slavery. How do we know it does? Because we’ve decided that racism & slavery are bad, and of course the Bible is source of all moral wisdom, so it simply must. Is there a case to be made against racism or slavery based on the actual contents of the Bible? If you read it without assuming the conclusion in advance then that’s a really really tough case to make.

If you completely ignore the OT, you have a little less to deal with, I believe. But if you include it, you have a “a really really tough case” explaining that you don’t think slavery should be a normal part of our daily lives.

However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)

If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years. Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom. If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year. But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him. If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master. But the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.’ If he does this, his master must present him before God. Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl. After that, the slave will belong to his master forever. (Exodus 21:2-6 NLT)

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)

Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them. (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)

Note that the last two are NT. The benevolence and egalitarianism and general okayness of the NT are often grossly exaggerated. The NT is a very mixed bag, the ‘gospels’ are a very mixed bag, and there’s plenty of naaaasty stuff in there.

Praising Christians (who supported and operated slavery) for then stopping slavery is a bit like praising the pain in your head for going away, or praising the torturer because he’s taken the electrodes from your bollocks. But, then, these people who inhabit the airwaves of the BBC’s “Thought for the Day” slot on the Today programme (where Fraser pontificates, and he’s one of the slightly better ones) would not stand up to philosophical argument, such are the contradictions, generalisations, unlikely, if not impossible, extrapolations. Once in a while, one of them says something sensible, but there’s a lot of wasted airtime before and after these little gems.

“a bit like praising the pain in your head for going away, or praising the torturer because he’s taken the electrodes from your bollocks.”

Very good. And exactly so.

“such are the contradictions, generalisations, unlikely, if not impossible, extrapolations”

That’s just it. That’s what I keep – er – disagreeing with. The sloppy ‘argument’ that is acceptable in newspapers and other major media. Religious pontificators get a free pass to have terrible standards for reasoning. Well, why, one wonders.